


Descent

by anamatics



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Insanity, Not Good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-01 04:24:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/351908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s created the perfect creature, now she’s not sure she has. It’s all muddled up in her head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Descent

**Author's Note:**

> From an anon drabble prompt on tumblr: "Myka is a character in a novel that H.G. is writing and the lines of sanity are becoming blurry."

**Descent**

00

There is blood everywhere when Wolcott finds her. It is a hot day in August, and Helena can feel his breath against the sweat at the back of her neck as he pulls the razor from her hand. Her hand is wet, red.

_It’s all so red_.

“Stop,” He says. He’s cradling her close to him, and she’s weeping openly. It’s an indulgence she’s never allowed him, but he’s now seen her at her worst. She’s always been untouchable to him, and now she’s more vulnerable than she’s ever been before. She’ll hang for what she’s done. “They’re dead.” 

She doesn’t care that the men are dead. Her lip curls upwards and she pushes Wolcott away. Her hands are reaching for the razor. She can take it from him in three simple steps: a jab to his shoulder and then an uppercut to the head. He’d be stunned at that point, shocked that she’d have the audacity to hit him at all. She’d deliver the final blow then. Kick him hard in the stomach so he’d fall, off balance, backwards into the growing pool of blood at their feet. 

She doesn’t know if she’ll kill him then. Kill him for seeing her like this, for seeing her at the basest level of her despair. He is a good friend, far too young to die. Maybe she’ll let him live.

They’re dead and it still isn’t enough. Her mind is still fractured, Christina is still gone. Her time machine didn’t bloody work. Nothing works it seems. 

She doesn’t realize she’s screaming until Wolcott presses his hand to her mouth and throws away the razor. The men are dead, her revenge is exacted.

Funny, she thinks, it doesn’t feel like justice has been served.

01

The regents are deliberating her fate. It is September, 1899, and Helena Wells knows that she will not live to see the turn of the century. She’s writing at a feverish pace, trying to finish one last story to carry her glory well past the end she sees coming. This last story, if it sells well, will take Charles into old age.

The man is an idiot, it’s the least Helena can do.

She doesn’t normally start stories _in medias res_ , it’s not her style. She prefers to first imagine characters and then build a world around them. Along the way, her stories usually take on a distinct political edge to them; their arguments are oftentimes to prove her own political beliefs.

This story had started out no different. She’d been toying with the idea of writing something different, but similar, to her previous works. Her name, albeit the one her brother had stolen from her, is well-known now. 

It would be her undoing. The one part of her perfectly executed plan that she had not envisioned coming to pass. 

She’d laid the groundwork weeks ago, before she’d even picked up the razor that had landed her in this state of pseudo-house arrest. Her work would be continued. 

Charles is H.G. Wells now; she’s given her idiot brother even her name. They have nothing left to take from her, and this story is pouring out of her pen at a rate that alarms even her.

“The devil’s in you,” Charles’ valet whispers when she tells him of her story. Her eyes are wide, mad. Her hair is down today, long and tumbling across her shoulders. “Mum,” he adds, with a nod of his head.

She’s used to it. Used to the insanity, it’s always been lurking at the back of her mind.  
They’ll kill her for sure. Helena knows this. It’s only a matter of time.

02

She’s lonely. The only solace that she can find is in the characters that she’s created in this story. This story that is so different from her usual works. She’s writing from a woman’s perspective, an adventure novel about a woman with a man’s name who finds love and still manages to save the day using her wit and intellect.

(Wolcott thinks that she’s getting a little ahead of herself, politically, with the character. Helena just tells him to shut up and stop being a tool of the patriarchy.)

She thinks of this woman, of how wonderful a lover she might be. 

Helena did not realize it at first, but she’s written out her ideal lover. Every freckle, every birth mark, every quirk that she’s lovingly described is something she could very easily fall in love with.

Maybe she already has. 

“I wish you were real,” she whispers, setting down her pen and heading for dinner.

Her name is Myka.

03

They say she’s mad.

As a hatter, she replies. 

The only solace is her writing. 

Catturanga smiles sadly at her and tells her that she’s no longer welcome in the Warehouse. She’s a risk, they say. They don’t know what she’ll do. They don’t ban her, but she’s just not allowed in at present.

The regents are still debating her case.

She puts on a brave smile, sips her tea, and tells Catturanga about the strangest thing that happened to her the previous evening.

“I was in my room, working on the novel,” she begins. She feels like it’s the beginning of a bad joke. The piece doesn’t even have a working title. She’s thinking about paying homage to Jules Verne and calling it ‘The Descent,’ as this story also deals with a journey deep into the recesses of the Earth’s vast underground. 

Her mentor leans forward, his lips pursing thoughtfully as he sips his tea. She can see him wince with it is not quite perfect, as he does every time. 

Helena bites her lip – he knows she’s mad anyway, it doesn’t make a difference. “I heard her – the woman I’m writing about – she spoke to me.”

He doesn’t say anything at all, and Helena turns her attention back to her tea.

This probably isn’t a good idea.

04

“Why aren’t you sure about this?” Charles doesn’t know. She won’t tell him more than what he needs to know. Her friendship with Wolcott is strained enough as it is. “He was such a good match for you.”

Helena frowns, “His interests lie elsewhere. As do his loyalties.”

Charles doesn’t understand, and Helena lets him maintain his confusion for as long as she can. She can’t tell him that she’ll be put to death for her crimes, or worse. They’ll take her memory, strip her mind, and relocate her – probably somewhere awful like Kent. Or, she shudders, _America_.

“I never really understand you any more, sister,” Charles says. He’s standing in the doorway of her study – watching as she writes. He’s been doing that for years, listening to her read out bits of text, suggesting improvements when he sees them. They’re a good team.   
Helena hates him.

He stole her name and her glory. 

She just smiles and turns away. He lingers for a moment, before he leaves, head down and defeated. Like she feels. 

“He’s all you have left,” Helena whispers to herself. The words have become a mantra. This story, Charles and the strange occurrences that seemed to happen whenever she found herself writing late into the night. 

Nothing could explain those away.

05

“I think you’re not giving me enough dramatic play in this scene,” It’s nearing three o’clock in the morning, and she’s burning the midnight oil again. Not that Helena really sleeps any more. Her sleep is full of nightmares. Of the time travel, of what she did. Of what she’d had to relive over and over again. It had not been fair to Sophie, her poor maid. 

Being raped one time was enough.

Four times was insanity. But Helena had kept at it. There had to be some clue, something that would allow the flow of time to be altered. It could not just be a projection onto the past; there _had_ to be a way.

It had seemed so simple at the beginning.

She starts, alarmed at the sudden presence of another – female presence - where none should be. She has not taken a lover since long before Christina’s death. Now there isn’t time, and she won’t break a girl’s heart like that.

“Who’s there?” she demands, but there’s a grin on her face already. It is wide and insane and when she turns to see the woman she’s created perched on the edge of her bed, it grows wider still. 

The woman is tall, wearing practical clothing, and picking at the duvet. Her hair is a plethora of curls sticking out every which way, but somehow calmed into a semblance of a bun. She is beautiful, and Helena’s breath catches. 

She’s inspecting her fingernail, contemplating it, and Helena turns away, her cheeks flushed. “I wasn’t aware you were going to drop by.”

“I’m in your head,” the woman with the man’s name laughs, “How could I not be here?”

Helena doesn’t know the answer, but her hand reaches over and turns off the gas in the lamp on her desk. The room plunges into darkness. She knows what she’s going to do.

06

The visits become like clockwork and as October slips into November, Helena feels her mind go completely. There are long periods of her consciousness when she can remember nothing. She will awaken to find pages completed that she does not recall. A dark and insane love interest for her heroine. A complicated plot that is still developing.

They’re going to bronze her.

Catturanga has told her their verdict and Helena has accepted it because it is not death. She can be reborn anew.

Her plan is already in motion. 

She sends Charles to France, because he cannot be here when she is taken; and asks the Regents to be allowed to finish her novel.

She’s shocked when they agree. 

07

She’s writing late into the night, trying to finish. Her publisher wants to make this next novel a serial, and Helena’s content to let him. He’s a good man, and it will make her more money than she knows what to do with. Not that she cares, she’ll be dead soon anyway.

She bites her tongue, casting her head back and thinking of this woman with a man’s name.

“You’re doing it again,” Her Myka whispers, leaning over Helena’s shoulder and peering at the page, still half-written in Helena’s tidy handwriting. “Imagining me as real.”

Helena shrugs, sitting back in her chair and breathing in creation’s scent. “Maybe I want you to be real.”

Myka’s lips are on her cheek and her hands are pulling at the lacing of Helena’s loose shirt. “I can’t be real,” Myka whispers, her hands pushing fabric aside. “You could never create one such as me.”

Helena bits her lip. She wants to say Myka isn’t real, she can feel the hands on her, the arousal that pools at the base of her spine and slicks at her thighs. She wants to say a lot   
of things that she can’t.

The page lies before her, half-finished.

Helena wonders if she’ll live long enough to see this story completed, or if she’ll kill herself first.

They have plans for her, _Myka_ or whatever this being in her ~~mind~~ reality is, has plans for her. 

She knows she’s insane, has been for a long time now.

She’s long since decided she doesn’t care. She lets Myka kiss her and pull her away from the half-written story towards her bed. She’s powerless to resist, and Helena knows that she doesn’t actually want to say no.

That would be too easy.

08

They find her not long after. Sitting in her bed talking to the air. They tell her it is time. The novel is unfinished but the new year is nearly upon them, and there are… implications if Helena survives the turn of the century.

Charles will never see the novel to completion, Helena knows. She presses the papers into Wolcott’s hands as she passes him on her descent to hell. “Keep them safe for me,” she whispers fiercely. 

He nods solemnly and she kisses him on the cheek. It’s very forward, but she cares not for propriety. 

“H.G…” he trails off, watching as she struggles to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Never forget who you are,” she whispers as Catturanga pulls her away. 

09

The bronze is cold, and her madness is deafening.

She embraces the cold and the insanity like a long lost lover – knowing that the woman she   
created was nothing more than that. A lover she could never have, to fit into a life she lost herself.

Before she loses all track of time, she notes that it December 29th, 1899; she is thirty-four years old.


End file.
